Visitors to the sites were met with an error message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable”. The problem was widespread and was linked to an outage at cloud platform and content delivery network (CDN) Fastly. SEE: Hiring Kit: Computer Hardware Engineer (TechRepublic Premium) Fastly’s service status indicated that it was experiencing global CDN disruption, which caused the global issue, with services across North America, South America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, South Africa and India all suffering from a “degraded performance”. “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” Fastly said in a service update posted at 09:58 UTC. Services began returning about 45 minutes later when Fastly said, “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented” – at the time of publication, it isn’t certain what the exact issue was, although the company has been contacted for comment. Update: at 12:09, Fastly confirmed that a “service configuration” was the reason for the outage. “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online,” the company said via Twitter - and later confirmed in an email to ZDNet. “Fastly has observed recovery of all services and has resolved this incident. Customers could continue to experience a period of increased origin load,” Fastly said in an additional update at 12:41.
